"History is full of abnormal people..."

Basically a paraphrase of a quote from Stalin. I just started a bio of him called COURT OF THE RED TSAR which believe it or not I first heard about back when I worked retail.

My retail days were a mixed bag. I worked at Borders and enjoyed the store I started in, although the pay was quite low. At the time, I wasn't qualified for much else, having an English degree and no desire or aptitude for teaching.

I loved working with the books and helping customers find the books they were looking for. We had a lot of customers who were pretty serious about reading. But I hated dealing with music and DVDs and all of the other things the store sold. I especially hated working the cash register. You'd get jerks who would want to buy a newspaper with a $100 bill at ten in the morning. Stores generally don't have more than $40 or so in the register to start the day.

It was during the 2004 election so we'd get a lot of angry conservatives pissed off about why we didn't have certain books but only carried "liberal" books. The problem was made worse by one of the conservative publishing companies--they deliberately under-printed copies of an anti-Kerry book in order to pretend like the book was being "suppressed."

One of the funnier moments--there was a book out at the time called THE REPUBLICAN NOISE MACHINE about how conservatives disseminate their message. One day I had a lady come in and return it. She complained that she had bought it as a gift, "but then I found out the book was against Republicans." Oh those crafty liberal writers and their evil ways!

We ended up moving back to where we live now. I transferred to the Borders store here and got a rude awakening. The store here was not a book-oriented store and we generally didn't have any of the books that people would come in and ask for. Our system would say we did, but we could never locate anything, so just about all of the books were special ordered. It was really frustrating. Sometimes the inventory people would just tell me to give the customer some other similar book. When I couldn't sleep at night because I hated the job so much, I wound up quitting. They had cut my pay [lower cost of living here, about the only thing to recommend this burg] and hours so it wasn't that hard to walk away.